You might remember that a few weeks ago, we picked up Scottish friend William “Willy” Mather from the Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport here in Arizona and brought him to Flagstaff to start his rafting trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon? Well, today we are back at the airport, but this time we are picking up Steve “Sarge” Alt who finished a rafting trip down the same river just a few days after Willy finished his. Sadly, schedules didn’t allow for Willy to join friends Sarge and Frank “First Light” Kozyn on their trip and so while they were probably less than 50 miles apart at any given point during the past few weeks, their paths didn’t cross. But our paths did cross and even if we only have the opportunity to visit for a few hours, it’s well worth the time spent with these guys.

Sarge was on a seven-hour stopover which allowed us to pick up sandwiches and head over to Papago Park where we could pull a shaded picnic table and sit back to hear a few stories about this most recent river trip and a bit about the Selway trip up in Idaho that we had to bail out of this summer. While a small part of me wants to lament that Caroline nor I were on any white water river trips this year, I’d have to admit that I have nothing in the world to complain about.